Saturday, April 19, 2014

The Beginning
of the New School Year Starts in April: Student, Staff, and School Transition
Activities to Help Prepare for a Successful New School Year

Dear Colleagues,

While many schools across the country are
currently finishing up their state's "high stakes"
assessments to determine their students' academic proficiency--once that is
over, it is important to remember that:

The New School Year (in August) begins this Month
(in April).

The Need to Conduct End-of-Year
Student, Staff, and School "Transition" Evaluations

That is, before
the end of the current school year, schools need to look at their students,
staff, and the school itself to identify (a) what has or has not worked
effectively this year, and (b) what services, supports, or other resources are
needed for success next year.

These
evaluations are particularly important for schools that are in
Improvement status, and/or that have large numbers of academically
struggling or behaviorally challenging students. Indeed, we need to think about
the "lessons" that we have learned about these students this year
so that effective, successful instructional settings and intervention
approaches are ready for them on the first day of the new school
year.

In
addition, as part of this process, you need to know the functional literacy,
math, oral expression, and written expression capabilities of all students at
the end of this school year so that you can strategically organize your
classrooms in preparation for the coming year according to the existing
skills and needs of your students.

At the
elementary level, for example, this ensures that teachers have the right
"mix" of students in each class (e.g., no fewer than three different
functional skill groups) so that they can truly differentiate instruction.

At the
secondary level, for example, this ensures that 10th grade
science teachers know the incoming reading and math skills of their students on
the first day of school so that they can modify lessons, materials, and
activities to maximize their students' understanding of the science
content-even when they have difficulty reading the textbook or understanding
needed mathematical calculations.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Free Resources to Help You Conduct
End-of-Year Evaluations

To
help you to successfully complete these transition processes, we would
like to provide you with a FREE national webinar, and a FREE Technical Assistance Paper
on how to evaluate the current (and past) academic and behavioral status of
your students.

The webinar
(see below) is entitled,

The New
School Year Starts in April - Systematically Transferring Academic and
Behavioral Response-to-Instruction Success

We hope
that these two resources are useful to you as you prepare for the end of your
school year- while you, simultaneously, prepare for the successful beginning of
your next school year.

For
schools that are in (Priority or Focus) school improvement status, or that have
large numbers of students receiving Tier II or Tier III services, we hope that
these strategies will help turn-around your student instruction and achievement
processes.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

As
always, if you need more in-depth attention to these (and other school
improvement, student discipline, RtI/multi-tiered service) issues, we are
always available to provide a lending ear and a helping hand- just give us a
call or drop us an e-mail so that we can help you plan now for your
next great school year.

Meanwhile, I hope that your state assessments have gone well, that (if
relevant) you had a great Spring break, and that you and your colleagues are
geared up to finish the last 30 to 40 school days of the current school year
proactively, productively, and successfully.

Sunday, April 6, 2014

New U.S.
Department of Education Report Just Released:New Office for Civil Rights
Report Reveals that African American and Male
Preschool Students are Disproportionately Suspended from Preschool

Dear Colleagues,

Late last
month (March 21, 2014), the
U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights released its first
comprehensive look at civil rights data from every public school in the country
in nearly 15 years. Called The Civil Rights Data Collection
(CRDC), data from the 2011-2012 school year were reported, and the most
newsworthy information showed that:

More than
8,000 public preschoolers were suspended at least once, with black children
and boys receiving a disproportionate number of these suspensions. Indeed,
while Black youngsters made up about 20% of all preschool pupils, close to 50%
of these children were (disproportionately) suspended more than once. While
boys of all races represented 54% of the preschoolers included in the report,
more than 80% of them were (disproportionately) suspended more than once.

In a
press conference announcing the Report, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
called the data "mind-boggling." And, indeed, the data are
mind-boggling. . . but nothing new.

In fact,
we have known for at least a decade-for example, through the Harvard Civil
Rights Project and researchers like Walter S. Gilliam at Yale University-that
preschool students are the most suspended age group of students in
public education.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The real
questions are, "Why is it happening?" and "What do we do about
it?"

Relative
to the first question, there are many possible contributing factors.
Poverty, potential teacher bias, high student-teacher classroom ratios at the
preschool level, dysfunctional families and poor parental supervision, preschool
students being raised by the TV and impacted by media violence were cited in an
Education Week article about this Report.

And while
we need to be sensitive to these issues, we need to understand that these
reasons are correlational or contributory factors and rarely causal
in nature.

Critically, the primary causal reason for preschool "discipline"
problems is that the many preschool students have not learned and mastered the
developmentally-appropriate social, emotional, and behavioral (both individual
and interpersonal) skills that they need to be successful.

Indeed,
preschoolers often imitate the behaviors that they have observed, or randomly
try out different behaviors-sometimes not knowing if they are "good
choices" or "bad choices." Sometimes, preschoolers use the
same behaviors at school that help them to "survive" at home. And
sometimes, the behaviors that are inappropriate at school have been supported,
reinforced, or not corrected at home.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

All of
this leads to the following important points or recommendations:

**
Preschools need to have a formal, developmentally-appropriate social skills
training program that is taught by teachers who are both qualified and
trained to teach these programs.

**
Preschool staff need to understand that preschoolers need clear and
explicitly-stated expectations, constant verbal guidance and feedback,
behavioral prompts to organize their awareness and thinking, and adult
supervision and presence. Preschoolers, cognitively and developmentally, do not
have the ability to anticipate or predict events (unless they have learned them
from previous experiences), nor can they "walk in another student's
shoes"-understanding "how another child feels." Remember,
according to Piaget, preschoolers are pretty egocentric at this age level.

**
Preschools need to have a written behavioral standards and accountability
document that differentiates behaviors that are "Annoying" versus
"Disruptive" versus "Antisocial/Major Disruption" versus
"Dangerous/Extreme." If teachers consistently use these standards to
categorize and respond to different intensity levels of students' inappropriate
behavior, this should largely resolve the "teacher bias" issue.

"Consequences do not change behavior, they only
motivate students to want to change behavior."

That is,
after a consequence is over, students must be taught and practice (ideally,
with the same adults and in the same setting where the original
"offense" occurred) the appropriate, replacement behaviors as
part of a "teachable moment." This is what holds students
accountable (to appropriate behaviors), and increases the probability that
these behaviors will occur the next time.

** A
school suspension is not a consequence. . . it is an administrative
response or decision prompted by a student's inappropriate behavior. For
preschoolers, suspension rarely acts as a consequence that motivates them to
"want to do better the next time."

** If a
student continues to demonstrate inappropriate behavior-despite a well-taught
social skills program and a consistently-implemented accountability system, a
data-based problem solving process (largely led by preschool behavioral experts
like school psychologists, behavioral consultants, speech pathologists, etc.)
needs to proceed (with parent permission) to determine why the
behavioral pattern persists. This assessment may/should be completed as
part of the local public school district's Child Find Process.

*
Finally, if a student needs to be expelled or "released" from a
preschool, the preschool should file an immediate Child Find petition with the
local public school district.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

We have
known for years that students from poverty often come into preschool and
kindergarten with approximately 20,000 expressive or receptive vocabulary words
less than students coming from middle class or above homes. Clearly, the needed
intervention here is to intensively work with and teach these students the
vocabulary that will close this gap.

Similarly, when preschoolers come to school exhibiting "behavioral
gaps" that result in behavior or "discipline" problems, we need
to focus on the strongest high-hit intervention: teach the expected
behaviors.

While, in
the long term, it is important to also reach out to prevent these skill deficits
from occurring, the Civil Rights Data Collection report demonstrates that suspension is
not the answer. If suspension were the answer, every suspended student
would return from a suspension demonstrating consistently appropriate behavior
and decreased (or absent) levels of the original inappropriate behavior.

Clearly, that is not happening (look at the
"twice-suspended data in the Report). And so, we need more common
sense, research-based approaches to address this issue.

Hopefully, some of the ideas and points in
the discussion above will help all of us on our way.

Connecting with Howie

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About Me

Howard M. Knoff, Ph.D. is the creator and Director of Project ACHIEVE.After 22 years as a university professor and over 12 years as a federal grant director for a state department of education, he continues his national work as a full-time national consultant, author, and presenter.

Dr. Knoff is recognized nationwide as an expert in the following areas:

·School Improvement and
Turn-Around, Strategic Planning and Organizational Development

·Differentiated Academic
Instruction and Academic Interventions for Struggling Students

·Social, Emotional, and
Behavioral Instruction and Strategic and Intensive Interventions for Challenging
Students

·Multi-tiered (RtI)
Services, Supports, and Program

·Effective Professional
Development and On-Site Consultation and Technical Assistance

From 2003 through 2015, he was the Director of the federally-funded State Improvement Grant (SIG; 2003-2009) which then became the State Personnel Development Grant (SPDG; 2009-2015) for the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE). These grants funded the state-wide scale-up of Project ACHIEVE--especially its school improvement, positive behavioral support, and multi-tiered RtI service system components. Through the ADE's Elementary and Secondary Education Act flexibility process, Project ACHIEVE was the state's school improvement model for all Focus schools.

Prior to that, Dr. Knoff was a Professor of School Psychology at the University of South Florida (USF, Tampa, FL) for 18 years, and Director of its School Psychology Program for 12 years. He also was the creator and Director of the Institute for School Reform, Integrated Services, and Child Mental Health and Educational Policy at USF, and was instrumental in leading the program to the accreditation of its doctoral program by the American Psychological Association.

Project ACHIEVE is a nationally-recognized school
effectiveness/school improvement program that has been designated a National
Model Prevention Program by the U. S. Department of Health & Human
Service’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
(SAMHSA).Over the past 30 years, Howie
has implemented Project ACHIEVE components in thousands of schools or school
districts—training in every state in the country.He has also been awarded over $21 million in
federal, state, or foundation grants for this work, and recently received two
School Climate Transformation grants and one Elementary and Secondary
Counseling grant from the federal government to support work in Pennsylvania,
Michigan, and Kentucky.

Dr. Knoff received his Ph.D. degree from
Syracuse University in 1980, and has worked as a practitioner, consultant,
licensed private psychologist, and university professor since 1978.Dr. Knoff is widely respected for his
research and writing on school reform and organizational change, consultation
and intervention processes, social skills and behavior management training,
Response-to-Intervention, and professional issues.

He has authored or co-authored 18 books,
published over 100 articles and book chapters, and delivered over 1,000 papers
and workshops nationally—including the Stop & Think Social Skills
Program (preschool through middle school editions) and the Stop &
Think Parent Book:A Guide to Children’s
Good Behavior through Cambium Learning/Sopris West Publishers and Project
ACHIEVE Press, respectively.

Dr. Knoff has a long history of working
with schools, districts, and community and state agencies and
organizations.For example, he has consulted with a number of state departments of
education, the Department of Defense Dependents School District during Desert
Storm in 1991, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.He has also served as an expert witness in
federal court five times, in addition to working on many other state and local
cases—largely for legal advocacy firms who are representing special education
and other students in need.

Specific to
school safety issues, Dr. Knoff was on the writing team that helped produce Early
Warning, Timely Response:A Guide to
Safe Schools, the document commissioned by President Clinton that was sent
to every school in the country in the Fall of 1998; and he participated in a
review capacity on the follow-up document, Safeguarding our Children: An
Action Guide.

A recipient of the Lightner Witmer Award
from the American Psychological Association's School Psychology Division for
early career contributions in 1990, and over $21 million in external grants
during his career, Dr. Knoff is a Fellow
of the American Psychological Association (School Psychology Division), a Nationally
Certified School Psychologist, a Licensed Psychologist in Arkansas, and he has
been trained in both crisis intervention and mediation processes.Frequently
interviewed in all areas of the media, Dr. Knoff has been on the NBC Nightly
News, numerous television and radio talk shows, and he was highlighted on an
ABC News' 20/20 program on "Being Teased, Taunted, and
Bullied."

Finally, Dr. Knoff was the 21st President of the National Association of
School Psychologists which now represents more than 25,000 school psychologists
nationwide. He is constantly sought after for his expertise in a wide variety of school,
psychological, and other professional issues. You can e-mail him at: knoffprojectachieve@earthlink.net